Safety Performance Improvement Paper

NURS 490: Nursing Leadership

 

Purpose of Assignment

To identify a safety issue within a health care organization that needs to change in order to promote better delivery of patient care; to demonstrate an ability to collaboratively problem-solve in an interdisciplinary environment while working towards resolution of a common problem. 

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Student Approach to Assignment

My topic for change was on reducing alarm fatigue in an inpatient setting. Though this was a group paper, my personal values and interests are vested in this paper, as alarm safety has been a hot topic in my own work environment. Due to my unit experiencing two sentinel events related to alarm safety in the past several months, I am very passionate about implementing a change to improve this safety issue. I therefore approach the assignment with my work experiences in mind when discussing how to apply this change.

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Reason for Inclusion of this Assignment in the Portfolio 

Within this paper, I show my commitment to best safety practices within my own work environment, as the situation is specific to my hospital unit. Alarm fatigue frequently impacts me and is revealed in this paper to be a worldwide safety problem, which is why I chose to include this into my portfolio. The paper reflects my dedication to implement a unit change for the sake of protecting my patients.

 

Domain 5: Quality and Safety &

Domain 6: Interprofessional Partnerships

(17) Articulate the nurse’s role as a member of the interprofessional team in promoting safety and preventing errors and near misses.

After the paper discusses the overarching issue of safety that alarm fatigue poses in an inpatient setting, it highlights the importance of the nurse’s role in preventing and managing alarms safely to mitigate alarm fatigue. Examples of this include setting appropriate alarm parameters and attending alarm management education sessions. The nurse’s role to teach and encourage this change within the unit’s other healthcare members is also thoroughly discussed, showing the nurse’s responsibility for this safety issue among the interprofessional team. 

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Domain 5: Quality and Safety &

Domain 8: Informatics and Healthcare Technologies

 (30) Accesses and utilizes data and information from a wide range of sources to evaluate patient safety and care outcomes.

To identify an accurate understanding of alarm fatigue, my group and I used ten different sources, most of which were peer reviewed journal articles, that consisted of systematic reviews, cross-sectional studies, non-experimental descriptive research, governmental websites, textbooks, and more. Using these sources, we determined how reducing alarm fatigue can lead to important safety outcomes such as less desensitization and better reactions to true alarms.

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Download a Word document of my Intro page here.

Download my Safety Performance Improvement paper here.